Month: February 2017

Pre-Extreme ECW is a weird beast. Here we have a match between four guys who were never really ECW guys for another promotion’s title. We got the W*ING Tag Champs, The Headhunters, going up against a Los Boricua and the man, the myth, the Big Japan Crocodile Deathmatch King…Mitsuhiro Matsunaga.

This match is being contested under W*ING Rules, which means they are being contest under ECW rules before those existed (ECW still had countouts and DQs and stuff at this point). Lots of ugly brawling. Perez gets busted open in like 8 seconds or something.

The ending of the match is stupid as hell. A Headhunter hits a moonsault on Perez and goes for the cover. The ref totally ignores this. Matsunaga and the other Headhunter come in. The first Headhunter gets up off Perez. Matsunaga gets him in a small package. The ref ignores this as well. The illegal Headhunter pins Perez while the illegal Matsunaga has the legal Headhunter in a small package. The ref finally gets off his duff and counts three while both teams have illegal pins.

Joey Styles is here to give us a quick rundown of what’s coming up in this special 90 minute episode of ECW.

We got the tag team champs in action in a six man tag match and Terry Funk will be defending his ECW Heavyweight Championship against the Franchise, Shane Douglas. Let’s get down to the ring for that big six man tag match!

Road Warrior Hawk is on a singles run in good old Eastern Championship Wrestling. Here he’s taking on The Pitbull in a bout with lots of power moves and very little selling. Shane Douglas is on commentary with Joey Styles. He thinks little of Hawk as a singles wrestler.

Hawk picks up the win and this being ECW, Jason tries to attack Hawk only to be thrown by the Road Warrior into The Pitbull. For some reason, this causes the Public Enemy to hit the ring to randomly beat everyone down. Taz and Kevin Sullivan show up with pipes to beat the PE up which causes Shane Douglas to leave the announce location to go fight people in the ring. Terry Funk shows up with a ladder that he randomly hurls into the ring. He and Shane Douglas end up brawling into the back. ECW! ECW! ECW!

We kick off 1994 with a new extended opening credits reel. Man alive is this thing long. I’m curious what non-licensed song they used originally because on the WWE Network it’s replaced with generic butt rock.

The show opens with really badly recorded footage from Holiday Hell. The lights are going out and there are bodies everywhere. I think this is Sabu vs. Terry Funk match but it’s hard to tell since they keep shutting off the goddamn lights. I’m sure it will make more sense later on. Time for some opening credits!

I love gimmick matches and in my rather humble opinion there is no finer gimmick than the Royal Rumble. Thirty men enter. One man walks out with a shot a championship gold. There are usually some comedic spots, some decent in-ring action, and a surprise entrant or two that make it a must watch PPV, more so even than the Granddaddy of them all, WrestleMania. So how was the 2017 Rumble? Let’s find out.

We’re in Cameron, North Carolina tonight for Total Nonstop Deletion. Senor Benjamin tells us (en Español) that we shouldn’t try this at home and Vanguard 1 informs us that no drones were harmed in the making of this event.

From there it’s time for a montage! Reby’s playing a piano. Matt Hardy’s in a dilapidated boat in the middle of a lake. Jeff Hardy is doing edgelord landscaping. Things are about to get broken!